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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile.

I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook

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Facebook groups and events is basically the only reason I use Facebook, and while it’s very anecdotal I’m not the only one in my also anecdotal network.

It’s not actually the functionality that works for Facebook, it’s the fact that people have a Facebook account that they check. As more and more people quit, it becomes more and more of a bother to continue using Facebook to organise things, but when they have 3 billion users, they’ll probably remain a good place for groups and events for quite a long time to come, unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has.

As others point out, social media sort of leaves a gap as far as being “the people registrar” or a modern form of the yellow pages. But as long as so many of us remain on there because it is what it is, then they can really continue to fuck around quite a bit before “dying”. I think it’ll be legislation that kills them in the end, because unlike other large American tech companies, Facebook doesn’t seem to have a plan that doesn’t involve making money off privacy data. Even though Google is obviously struggling with being an advertisement company first, they could potentially shift to other products, but what can Facebook really do?

> unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has

Which they've also hijacked... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

> unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has.

Unfortunately e-mail is slowly dying for normal users. Most apps are now emphasizing phone numbers, and some of them don't even allow E-mails to sign up.

> I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook

I can easily see this pivot lead to a short term growth, but I don't get why this metric is so blindly trusted, when it's clearly more complex. (If there is one thing I really appreciate about engineers, is that most of us understand trade-offs, and our null-hypothesis is that almost everything is a tradeoff. Growth is NO exception)

Concretely, Facebook sits on arguably the most valuable asset in ad-tech today: the most complete real life social graph that has ever existed. Secondary, they have been very successful with mindless doom-scrolling that drove up the value of their business like crazy.

Now, Tiktok has come along and likely by chance found an even more powerful doom-scroller, the dopamine 9000, and they've been spreading like crazy. Of course that takes away ad-views from FB. FB is in panic mode and going on a meth-like crunch to copy-paste-rebrand tiktoks engagement machine. This may seem sound, doom-scrolling makes a lot of money after all.

But here's the problem: there will be more tiktoks in the future, and the barrier of entry isn't insane anymore. Building a social graph, however, one that includes uncles and grandmas for the entire world? That's a LOT harder. If I were Facebook (and a cynical douche) I would weather out the storm, carefully learning from tiktok and others, slowly evolving the product while "respecting" (low bar) the current user base.

Now I have no doubt that FB and IG can pivot to become a worse tiktok and yet still call it a success, making engagement shoot up short term. But by doing so, they dilute their product even more. Lots of people, like me, have primarily left because of this ongoing pivot - others are less sensitive and stay, for now. But pivoting so aggressively is a very risky move. If 20% of the local pottery/yoga/parent group refuses to use fb, the next casual group will go somewhere else instead. At the end of the day, FB is making itself more and more replaceable.

> Now, Tiktok has come along and likely by chance found an even more powerful doom-scroller, the dopamine 9000

I don't think older people who were raised in a longer attention span world (without even flashy jump cuts on TV) will find short attention span videos appealing.

I could be wrong. One thing that would tell me I'm wrong is if there was a robust amount of people over 40 on TikTok. I don't have that data, but Facebook probably does.

Edit: Only a quarter of TikTok users are over 34 years old

https://www.omnicoreagency.com/tiktok-statistics/

I have observed almost the opposite. Sure, younger people are early adoptors but the older folks don't have a natural resistance and are easily hooked. People addicted to Facebook are increasingly middle aged.

That's another reason why I think fb needs to calm their tits and chill out a bit – sure, Tiktok is super popular at the moment but this level of addiction is something I expect younger generations to cope with better. It wouldn't surprise me if the tiktok reign will be short lived.

TV is a good example, because it had a similar effect on hijacking previously unexplored attention mechanisms. It's also a good example because it deteriorated into an irrecoverable ad-hell, yet younger generations found refuge in higher quality substitutes (Netflix etc) and now cable is dying slowly (as they should). Thanks to a modernized and relatively sane approach, tv as a medium is better and makes more money than ever. It speaks to the fact that in the long run, consumers will go elsewhere when giants feed them crap products and – importantly – by the time they do, the giants are unable to keep up.

Facebook needs to stop being afraid to launch new products.

They should have launched a TikTok clone as an independent brand.

Instead, they're falling into the Microsoft trap of "Everything has to be shoehorned into our existing userbase and products."

They did in fact launch a clone https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/launching-reels-on-faceboo... but it has not taken the world by storm.

The hard work is figuring what dethrones TikTok and building _that_

Yes, within the Facebook app.

Which was the point of my comment: Facebook needs to be more daring and launch non-Facebook brands for products that are not like Facebook. (Or Instagram, etc)

>I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces.

People said you were wrong, not because you were technically wrong, but because what you said was dilute to the point of being meaningless.

All great things die. Look at the great companies of old: GE, Sears, IBM. They all suck now. One day FB, Google, Apple, etc will join them. That's the natural cycle of things

So just saying 'FB is dying' is like stating the Earth is dying because the sun explodes in a couple billion years. Yeah we get it... and?

Mean while though, during an economic down turn, they came in missed revenue by 1% while microsoft missed by 3%. They still make 20B+ dollars per quarter.

So like, what's your point?

Point taken. Ok, how about "Facebook faces declining interest in key demographics after years of explosive growth."

I've read young people say over and over again that Facebook is for old people. Becoming more like TikTok is not going to change their minds.

If you'd like to catch up on the conversation we had 4 months ago here it is:

Ask HN: Is Facebook Dying? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30860859

I found the conversation to be very instructive. Many people seem to agree with you that it is not dying. I'm not convinced (and I'm not talking about $, I'm talking about overall cultural relevance and interest in the platform. I'm sure they'll find ways to squeeze money out of old people like me. I've been seeing a lot crypto ads lately)

"He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying" - Bob Dylan

It seems like you've hijacked the definition of the word "dying" to justify an existentialist screed. People generally use the word "dying" to indicate that something is close to death, not that it will eventually die.

Nobody would look at a healthy young man on his first day at college and say he's dying. So no, the original point does not appear to be dilute.

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